Founding Frontend (Design) Engineer

San Francisco

Sound like a good fit? Email founders@mesa.dev with examples of your work.

Our mission

To build the next generation of purpose-built developer tooling to bend the curve on software quality and development velocity. We are starting with the problem of code review and quality control.

The role

This is a hybrid role between product engineer and product designer. We’re looking for the “Dream Architect” — a Founding Frontend Engineer / Designer that can design and implement new interaction primitives, write code that brings designs to life, and build a best-in-class user experience loved by developers.

You’ll be building technical workflows, and designing information-dense user experiences that are intuitive and satisfying. In many cases you’ll be running ahead of the team, envisioning the future of the product and clarifying the vision with designs that help us anchor our plans.

Some of the work for this rule includes building highly performant web frontends even as the data and content (such as PR diffs) enters into the 10s of thousands of DOM nodes, implementing sync engines for realtime collaborative workflows, implementing pixel-perfect designs, improving ergonomics and accessibility, and solving complex technical UX workflows.

Our tech stack is a Typescript monorepo with React, Vite, Tanstack Router, on the Frontend and Hono, Drizzle, Postgres, on the backend. We are deployed to AWS Lambda and ECS using SST.

Our team

Mesa is lead by two repeat founders

Oliver Gilan (CEO) - prev Co-founded Antimetal, ex Census, Microsoft

Benjamin Warren (CTO) - ex YC, Census, Microsoft

We are backed by incredible, deeply technical, investors including Innovation Endeavors, Essence VC, South Park Commons, Thomas Wolf (CSO @ Hugging Face), Soleio, and others.

Why design The Mesa?

Not just another SaaS dashboard: Most SaaS today is copy-paste — a few dashboards, lists, and forms. Mesa is creating new primitives for understanding large code diffs, collaborating effectively, and building great software. The work will be novel and creative.

Be seen by the world’s greatest builders: Our early investors and users invented search, the feed and the like button. From day 1, your code will empower great builders to create the next big thing.

Build for yourself: Mesa brings together engineering, product, and design in a single collaboration layer. You will use Mesa every day to build and ship software to make your life better as an engineer.

You’ll be a good fit if you…

Obsess over user experience. Keyboard shortcuts, information hierarchy, visual feedback, performance. The details are hard to get right but it’s the details that determine user experience.

Create “yes and” designs. You proactively explore ideas for the product through your designs. You aren’t afraid to throw away prototypes and are comfortable churning out variants and experimental designs to help the team explore the solution space effectively.

Understand the tech stack at a deep level. We use React, Tailwind, and Vite. You should have a deep understanding for how to optimize our component tree, improve our builds and delivery of the deployed bundle, and know the latest techniques in SSR and data fetching.

Know how to 80/20 effectively. Velocity is the result of making smart tradeoffs.

Want to grind and be recognized. Effort is the only input that is entirely in our control. We stay focused and stay late, because nothing feels better than the recognition that we’ve built something great.

Location

We are based in San Francisco and work in-person every day from our office in South Park. We work from home on weekends.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation: $180k - $250k, 1% - 3% equity

Healthcare: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision for you and your family

Transportation: We provide a stipend for your commute to the office

Other: We provide lunch in the office 2 days a week.

Build with us.